musings of a christianhttp://devo.reverielied.net
Sat, 19 Mar 2016 04:16:52 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.14Urbana15: #hack4missionshttp://devo.reverielied.net/?p=329
http://devo.reverielied.net/?p=329#respondFri, 18 Mar 2016 02:50:05 +0000http://devo.reverielied.net/?p=329Continue reading →]]>(Suuuuuppppeeerrrr late post – but better late than never)
So this past December I went to Urbana student missions conference in St.Louis, MO. The theme this year was “What Story Will You Tell?” – and now here I am, writing my story to share with you.

Now I could tell you about all the awesome things I experienced for the first time at Urbana. Things like how awesome the worship/singspiration was (LANGUAGES WOO!); how I learned and heard so much during morning bible studies and during each session speaker. I could tell you about how I felt challenged in my faith or how I want to do and serve so much more now that I’m home.

But I’m not going to talk about any of that today.

Some Backstory

Backtrack a bit, I have known about Urbana for as long as I’ve been going to church. I had never really been interested in checking out this conference (even though it’s a huuugge one that happens every 3 years) mainly because I wasn’t particularly interested or involved with the missions aspect of my faith. My image of missions and what it was all about was also, for a long time, pretty narrow. To me missions was about going “out there.” Out to remote villages, underground and home churches; out to some developing country to teach, to dig water wells, to build houses and schools, serve in clinics etc.:

Now I’m not saying that these are all bad things to associate with “missions”. These people are doing awesome things to help others, and if you want to really see God work somewhere, you will see it in these places, hands down (I’ve never heard of anyone going on a missions trip and not seeing God’s awesome work). But for those of us who aren’t medical professionals, teachers, charismatic speakers or physical labourers…or may not have the finances to make such a trip….people with computer/tech skills, research skills, business specialists, artists, designers, musicians, biologists, anthropologists, filmmakers, linguists, physicists, accountants etc….How can we serve in God’s global mission? I wondered. How can I best use the gifts I have – in my case – my love and passion of technology to help and serve? So this year (or well, this past year – 2015), I decided to go to Urbana and find out. And in the process of choosing what seminar track to go for while registering, I found #hack4missions.

a missions-focused hackathon (bonus: I am in this picture somewhere)

A missions-focused hackathon. What?! Christian hackers you say? Is there such a thing? Sounds pretty crazy (the good kind of crazy), and I had never done a hackathon before (I’ve done ONE design slam…and…that’s it…yep). But you know what? The idea and challenge of rethinking missions and using technology to (potentially) change the world? I’M SOLD, I’ll take up that challenge, SIGN ME UP. Seriously though, I was SUPER EXCITED (and nervous) about this.

Day 1: Dawn of the First Day – 72 hours remaining –

Or maybe it’s actually day 2, because we had a night session before…Anyway

Day 1, no idea what to expect (other than to do work). About 190 of us participants checked-in and sat down to listen to the 12 challenge leads pitch their projects to us (sidenote: I happened to find a seat in a row of more Canadians lolll – who also knew the 2 friends I came with LOL. it was meant to be ;D). After that we all split off to learn more about each project and then choose one to work on for the next 3 days.

Click to learn more about all the challenges that we worked on

Oh, and did I mention these are all REAL projects? These aren’t projects that just started and ended at #hack4missions. These are projects that are still being worked on after Urbana!

How bad UX design killed Jenny – #hospitalrun

So I chose to work on a project called HospitalRun, and open-source Hospital Information System (HIS) project started by a small team (i.e. pretty much one guy) at CURE International. The platform was to be deployed to hospitals in developing countries to help them transition from a paper-system to and electronic-based system. User interviews noted that the largest problem with the paper system was that records and patient notes frequently got lost or destroyed. Other issues with the paper system included the large amount of time spent on doing admin paperwork. But anyway, you might be thinking, why not use existing software? Well….let me tell you a story about Jenny. Or rather, let me share with you this story about Jenny:

TL;DR, when your HIS looks like THIS MONSTROSITY:

gahhh, what is this???

Obviously, bad things can happen. Lives are literally lost because of disorganized or incorrect information.

Now my immediate thought to things like this are that WE CAN TOTALLY FIX THIS. Though probably not in 3 days, but at least start that process of making things better. Our challenge/ask for this project was to design/prototype a user dashboard for different 3 different user groups (doctors/nurses, lab techs, pharmacists/inventory managers). Much of the platform was already built/designed, so we had some things we could leverage in our solution.

sample screen from the hospitalrun site

So for the next 3 afternoons (probably more than that really) we brainstormed, photoshop-ed, illustrated, made terrible-sketches, covered our white board with crazy things, developed things in tandem with what little design we came up with; and in the end, worked up (I think) a pretty decent working skeleton for the dashboard.

And yes, it could be better, but hey, we only got to work together for a little more than 3 hours each day! – Less than your typical 24-48hr straight hackathon.

The aftermath of my experience of “hacking” for Jesus

some of the awesome peeps I got to work with on the #hospitalrun team :D

I loved and enjoyed participating in #hack4missions. Despite the fact that I didn’t get to go to any seminars, or really spend much time in the Exhibit Hall, Bookstore (which was probably a good thing) or Prayer Rooms; I got to have an awesome learning, encouraging and challenging missions experience at Urbana. I loved that we had all come together to work on (seemingly) every day, normal(?) (global) issues, not just to better the world; but to show God’s glory and character through the (little) actions, attitudes and work we had to offer during those 3 days. One of the best things I thought we did during our time together was when we stopped for a moment (during a crazy, panicked, stressful time of work and planning lol), to just pray. Boom! So refreshing, I loved it.

It’s been almost 3 months since Urbana ended. Now what?

I’m not exactly continually working on these kinds of projects right now as much as I’d like to. I thoroughly enjoy serving in my church and community as I did before Urbana. However, my picture of missions has expanded a lot, and if there’s an opportunity to serve and work in the “fields” (I do still stay connected and check up on our slack channels). Or if there’s an idea that can be executed. I’m totally down for it. The beauty of missions is that it is everywhere near and far. God’s Kingdom stretches to the ends of the earth and beyond. The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. However, I think in experiencing hack4missions, we’ve learned that there can be many more workers in all sorts of places.

And now, I leave you with some quotes from Urbana that continue to inspire, encourage and challenge me in my faith:

“God is not looking for spiritual giants. God is looking for spiritual lamps that will shine for Him”
– Patrick Fung

“Jesus calls you to redefine your ‘us'”
-Christina Cleveland”

“Sometimes we talk the bible to death; and TALK more than we DO”
-Francis Chan

“Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.”
-William Carey, 1792

From everlasting to everlasting
From everlasting to everlasting
From everlasting to everlasting
From everlasting to everlasting
Amen

-“Amen” by I Am They

]]>http://devo.reverielied.net/?feed=rss2&p=3400Random Musings #3http://devo.reverielied.net/?p=323
http://devo.reverielied.net/?p=323#respondTue, 24 Nov 2015 04:32:50 +0000http://devo.reverielied.net/?p=323Continue reading →]]>It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. The past few months I’ve been going through the Matthew devotional challenge for Urbana this year – which btw, I’m stoked for! Because I’ll be part of a sort of hackathon – i.e. thinking about how we can use technology ideas for missions/ministry.

That aside, today I read the first bit of Matthew 13 covering the Parable of Sower:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+13%3A1-23&version=NIV

As I finished reading this on my way to work in the morning, I couldn’t help but think of the youth I’m serving in my fellowship. I’ve seen people on the path, I’ve seen people in rocky places. But what hit me the most in this passage, was the seed in the thorns:

“The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful.”
-Matthew 13:22

It’s been a while since I’ve been in school, even longer since high school for that matter. But it just feels like the youth are constantly feeling overwhelmed. Burnt out from life; from school; from projects; from homework; from memorizing and studying for tests; exams; quizzes, you name it etc. They want to grow their faith, they want fellowship, some want to serve, but don’t know how to overcome the academic and time obstacles.

They’re holding seeds of faith that are trying to grow, all while the thorns of worry and concern for the “ideal future” are choking them….Heck, the worries of life choke me too sometimes. ><

And so I come to my struggle, my struggle with encouraging them to stay connected; encouraging them to build their life AROUND God, not fit God in the days/hours/minutes/seconds of “free time”; encouraging them to serve even if they feel uncomfortable/unqualified (I always think of Moses’ story in this case) etc.

Maybe that’s all I can do (i.e. encourage and be there), I don’t know. I can’t help but want to do more, but I don’t know how or what to do….

Welp, now that I’ve word-vomited, going to pray now.

]]>http://devo.reverielied.net/?feed=rss2&p=3230[Story time] Weekend adventure and gratitudehttp://devo.reverielied.net/?p=320
http://devo.reverielied.net/?p=320#respondTue, 10 Mar 2015 01:46:21 +0000http://devo.reverielied.net/?p=320Continue reading →]]>This past weekend my boyfriend and I visited a friend out in Burlington after dropping off another friend at a conference in Oakville that morning (we had stayed over at another friend’s place for convenience).

On our way back to Oakville to pick up my friend from the conference we stopped by our other friend’s place to pick up something my boyfriend had left behind. Minutes after leaving he noticed something wrong with the car. He pulled over and got out to check, it was a flat tire. Luckily we had not gone far from his friend’s place so we slowly drove back there to change the spare tire in (while I waited inside his friend’s place playing with his cat). After changing the spare in we left, but pulled over to talk for a bit about what we should do. Spare tires aren’t really meant for highway driving, and at this point we were still in Oakville with a friend that needed to be picked up. After talking and discussing with our parents as to what we should do, we decided to drive slower on the highway after picking up my friend from the conference.

The highway ride back was mostly smooth despite the fact that we were driving 15-20km under the limit. Just as we were about to get off the highway my boyfriend noticed something at the last minute on the road in front of him, it was a pothole (a fairly large one too). Unfortunately a car was in the lane beside us (to our right was the concrete barrier)…so over the pothole we went.

*thump thump thump thump*

It was obvious that the spare did not survive going over the pothole. We carefully pulled over and stopped the car to survey the damage. It was bad. Since we were metres away from getting off the highway, we decided to very carefully drive off (with the emergency lights on) it so we could call for help. A minute after we noticed there was a car driving very close behind us in the rear-view mirror. It was a police car! Even better, after we had gotten off the highway and thanked him for escorting us off safely, we had noticed that it was a highway patrol car with a LED sign on it. Specifically the ones that light up to redirect traffic! – He had redirected traffic around us, yay!

By now it was almost 1am, not wanting to keep my friend out so late (or leave my boyfriend by himself), I gave him my metropass so that he could get home by taking the bus near where we had stopped. Afterwards we called CAA to try and get the car towed to a nearby Canadian Tire, unfortunately because my boyfriend’s membership had be mysteriously cancelled he couldn’t get it authorized without his dad. With that plan scrapped he called his dad. 40mins later he was down where we were (with my boyfriend’s mom). They patched up the initial flat tire temporarily so that we could drive it over to the nearby Canadian tire (just down the street from where we were). We abandoned the car for the night in the parking lot and were dropped off at my house by his parents.

The next morning we back to Canadian Tire to get replacement tires for the flats. My boyfriend’s dad had told us to get some “cheap Michelin tires”, to which the autoshop clerk chuckled when we told him. However after some more talking and stock checking, we found that we were in luck. On the floor, they had some brand new Michelin tires (2015) that were from a discontinued line, and therefore a fraction of the price than the others we looked at (by that I mean they were $40/each). An hour later we left with brand new front tires and a spare that was from the other old pair.

So that was our weekend adventure. The reason I had decided to post this was because after all that, I felt incredibly thankful and protected by God’s grace (also amazed too hehehe). We had gotten the first flat tire near my boyfriend’s friend’s house; then had a police car escort us safely off the road after our 2nd flat tire. My boyfriend’s dad drove all the way down at 2am (or well 3am…because daylight savings time derp) to help patch the first flat and then drive us back to my house. Lastly, we were able to get an amazing deal for the replacement tires (something that the shop clerk really didn’t think could ever happen).

Despite all these hurdles, we came out safe. It could’ve been a lot worse; we could’ve panicked (my boyfriend did a bit), but I felt really calm and peaceful (for the most part lol), and I’m thankful to God for keeping us safe.

“Sometimes being angry isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes, being angry means you care a lot about something. I mean look at God, God got angry a lot. But then He came and loved is right back.”

Over the past weekend during my annual youth winter retreat we spent a lot of time/hours just spilling our guts to each other. We had some heated talks, ones that people might think could break friendships. But no, that’s not how I’ve ever felt about talks like the ones I’ve had with these “kids” (oh my, I paused before writing that, geeze that aged me LOL). Yes we’re angry, I get angry and sometimes I hate it because it makes me emotional and I don’t know how to word things together. Oh and because of those 2 things, a lot of the time it makes me cry. And then that leads to me getting more angry because I don’t know how to express why I’m angry.

….At the same time, when I reflect on those moments I can’t help but be incredibly thankful for when I get angry or when I talk to people who get fired up for things they are passionate about and care a lot about. Granted, I’m speaking of positive causes and God things for the most part here….but the weekend made me think again….

I know I hate getting angry, but maybe I should get angry more about some things.

My darkest valley, my greatest mountain
They are Your prairie, for You are constant
Your ways are higher than any other
So I will sing

God of the impossible
Maker of all miracles
I stand in awe of You
I am so amazed by how You
Reach into my brokenness
Make me beautiful again
I believe, yes I believe
Nothing is impossible with You

When I am weak, You are my strength
And all Your power is made complete
You turn my failures to victories
Hallelujah, hallelujah

Healer, Healer
I’m restored by a healer
Provider, Provider
I am filled by a provider
Deliverer, Deliverer
I’m saved by a deliverer
Savior, my Savior
I’m redeemed by a savior

—”God of the Impossible” by Sarah Reeves

This song came up when I was looking up some possible worship songs for the youth retreat I was a part of this year. Our theme was anxiety and trusting in God; although we didn’t end up using this song I still love the lyrics (despite the pre-recording sounding a bit corny hahaha). The chorus is probably my favourite and I love the contrasting in the first verse between our worries vs. God. I’ve said it before, and it’s been said many times elsewhere, God is the God of creation; of all things impossible, what makes you think He can’t take care of your storms and fires? lol

We decided that our theme would be anxiety + trusting in God based on these verses:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
Matthew 5:25-34

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 4:6-7

it makes me think and remember: wow, why do I forget to trust and rely on God? Do you know how much LESS STRESSED I am when I do? Seriously.

btw, it’s not that I still don’t worry, but my trust in God, reminds me that I don’t have do be as worried. Which means, more time for God! – win-win!

I was talking to my boyfriend about why church/fellowship is so important to our spiritual growth and thought of this verse.

I also compared the importance of fellowship to the things that help a plant grow. Plants need sun, soil, water, air, various nutrients from all those sources etc. to grow. Too much or too little of any of those parts probably isn’t good, and could result in the plant not growing properly. Our spiritual growth is similar. We need fellowship, we need prayer, scripture, service etc. for us to grow closer to God. If we don’t get enough of something, our growth becomes skewed.

“I’m sick of trying to live up to this world’s expectations.
So let’s live up to God’s instead! It may be hard. But at least they’ll never change”

This is what I’ve thought many times through my spiritual/life walk.

]]>http://devo.reverielied.net/?feed=rss2&p=3000Thanksgivinghttp://devo.reverielied.net/?p=297
http://devo.reverielied.net/?p=297#respondWed, 15 Oct 2014 23:49:41 +0000http://devo.reverielied.net/?p=297Continue reading →]]>This past weekend was thanksgiving, though I’m a bit late. I wanted to just list a whole bunch of things I felt thankful for in the moment. Most of these things I had said in prayer before dinner several times over the weekend, but I like the visual reminder

I’m thankful for:
-God’s love – in every form
-my loving parents and family
-my awesome friends
-the job that I’ve been blessed to still be in for the last 3 years
-every brother and sister in Christ that I’ve met, kept in touch with, still remember from who knows when
-my loving, challenging, encouraging boyfriend
-anything and everything else God has blessed me with always

Amen.
I’m thinking of making/keeping a whiteboard/wall of thankful things. Also a wall of prayers.